Tag: police state

Illinois governor warns cops on gun ban law: ‘Will do their job or won’t be in their job’

With a new ban on certains guns now in place in Illinois, some have said they won’t comply. Gov. J.B. Pritzker has a message for law enforcement: Do your job or else. Gun-rights groups say the ban won’t last long.

With counties across the state saying they won’t enforce a gun ban, or are Second Amendment sanctuaries, and some publicly saying they won’t comply with a looming registry, Pritzker said Illinois State Police will be responsible for enforcement.

“As are all law enforcement all across our state and they will in fact do their job or they won’t be in their job,” Pritzker said.

While Pritzker said he’s confident the law will survive a legal challenge, Guns Save Life Executive Director John Boch said it’s unconstitutional and they’ll prove it in court.

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FBI reveals it uses CIA and NSA to spy on Americans

The FBI revealed how the bureau uses the CIA and National Security Agency to probe the private lives of Americans without a warrant in its updated rulebook, which is the first version made public since the Obama administration. 

The handbook, rewritten in 2021, confirms a decade-old leak showcasing the bureau’s collaboration with the CIA and NSA for FBI probes that may involve surveillance without court orders against people not accused of any crimes. Such probes are known as “assessments” at the FBI.

The revelations will fuel critics who have long accused the FBI of abusing its national security surveillance powers.

The FBI’s partnership with U.S. intelligence agencies that are focused on foreign threats is expected to get intense scrutiny from the new Republican-run Congress. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Judiciary Committee are digging into how intelligence agencies target Americans. Plans include a new panel to examine the weaponization of the federal government against U.S. citizens.

New information about the FBI’s work with other federal agencies and state and local officials is included in the 906-page rule book authored during the Trump administration and revised under President Biden. The bureau published the updated Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide online after rejecting requests to make it public.

The words CIA and NSA are unredacted in section 20.2 of the 2021 rule book, while the full details of the section remain hidden from public view. A leaked 2011 copy of the FBI’s rule book without redactions obtained by The Intercept shows that section 20.2 covers name trace requests, which involve formal FBI requests for other agencies to conduct searches of their records regarding subjects of interest.

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‘Humiliated’: Americans detained, fined thousands for using wrong lane at border

Being shackled to a metal bench, left for hours, and then fined thousands of dollars.

Or in the alternative having their car confiscated.

That’s the experience being related by multiple American travelers who have run into a simple problem as they return to the United States through the Mexican border.

It’s all because they pick the wrong lane in which to approach the border. Mostly by accident, they get into the Sentri lane, which is designated only for those travelers who are pre-approved for crossings.

But once in that lane, there is no correction, as concrete barricades keep the travelers there.

Fox News relates that travelers from Los Angeles “are being detained and fined several thousand dollars for using the wrong lane.”

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Youngkin aims to stop sale of some cannabis products, expand enforcement in Virginia

Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration is trying to stop the sale of some potentially unsafe cannabis products.

Youngkin is asking lawmakers for more resources to bolster enforcement in his proposed budget, which will set the tone for debate in the 2023 session. Meanwhile, state officials say existing efforts to expand oversight have not resulted in any criminal penalties or lost permits to date.

Sarah Grant, general manager of “THE Dispensary” in Richmond, said state inspectors have stopped by three times since lawmakers took steps to enhance oversight last summer. They were asked to voluntarily remove all of their hemp-derived Delta-8 and Delta-10 edibles, which account for at least 40% of sales, according to Grant.

“We would at least have to cut staff and then we would have to look at closing our doors,” Grant said.

Grant says Delta-8 and Delta-10 are found naturally in small amounts in hemp, which is legal to sell. But a lack of regulation has allowed potentially unsafe synthetics with inaccurate labels to proliferate, according to some experts.

Grant said they’re currently defending the safety and legality of their products through an administrative hearing, which state officials described as an informal fact-finding conference.

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Researchers: California’s Digital License Plates Could Allow Hackers to Track Location

Security researchers were able to gain “super administrative access” to Reviver, the sole provider of California’s digital license plates, and track the GPS location of all of vehicles they are associated with.

A team of security researchers successfully obtained “full super administrative access,” which allowed them to perform a slew of tasks involving the company’s user accounts and vehicles, according to a blog post by researcher Sam Curry.

After gaining access, a hacker could track the physical GPS location of all license plates of Reviver customers, as well as change the slogan or personalized message at the bottom of the plates to arbitrary text.

The personalized messages on the license plates involves a feature that allows customers to digitally update the bottom section of their plates to display different messages, such as, “Go Team!” or “looking for a trail.”

Additionally, a hacker could update any vehicle status to “STOLEN,” which would alert authorities.

“An actual attacker could remotely update, track, or delete anyone’s REVIVER plate,” Curry wrote in his blog post, revealing that he and his team had found security vulnerabilities across the automotive industry, not just with Reviver.

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Real-Life ‘Training Day’: Inside the Corruption Scandal That Brought Down the Oakland PD

Nobody really knows how Ghost Town got its name, but the moniker fits. Walled off from most of Oakland by freeways on its northern and eastern borders and warehouses to the west, Ghost Town—known formally as the Hoover-Foster neighborhood — has been haunted since the mid-twentieth century by the combined forces of racism, deindustrialization, and chronic unemployment. It was always a working-class community, but for most of its existence, Ghost Town residents could find decent-paying jobs on the East Bay’s burgeoning industrial waterfront. That changed starting in the 1950s as factories closed, and Oakland’s economy descended into a multi- decade decline.

White residents left the neighborhood, and much of the rest of Oakland, for the prosperity of expanding suburbs. At one point, a high proportion of houses and storefronts in Ghost Town were vacant and boarded up. Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party (BPP), referred to West Oakland in his autobiography as a “ghost town but with actual inhabitants.” Newton’s sour comment stuck in the minds of locals, who started using the epithet themselves. If there was any doubt about whether the area should be called a ghost town, it was settled by the 1980s.

The federal “War on Drugs,” launched the previous decade by President Richard Nixon, transformed Ghost Town into a battlefield between rival dealers, and between dealers and cops. For the Oakland police, Ghost Town was hostile territory — a place to drive through cautiously while on patrol, meandering back and forth between West Street and San Pablo Avenue on long, numbered streets crowded with parked, semi-operable cars. In the 1990s Ghost Town truly felt abandoned. Darkness enveloped entire blocks of dilapidated bungalows, run-down apartment buildings, and weathered Victorians illuminated only by the neon glow of corner liquor stores. The sounds of gunfire and sirens were common. Murders were frequent. By this point, the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were spent, no longer a counterforce offering hope and some measure of order to the mostly Black residents of Oakland’s flatlands. The social decay of racism and poverty could not be held at bay.

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Biden admin asked Twitter to silence Robert F. Kennedy Jr

A recently published email has provided more evidence of President Joe Biden’s administration asking tech platforms to censor content that challenges the federal government’s Covid messaging.

The email shows the Biden White House’s Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team, Clarke Humphrey, requesting that Twitter remove a tweet from environmental health lawyer and author Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” Humphrey wrote to Twitter in the January 2021 email. “And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same ~genre that would be great.”

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In 2022, The IRS Went After The Very Poorest Taxpayers

On Wednesday, Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released data provided to it by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on audits performed by the agency in fiscal year 2022. Despite the infusion of new funding earmarked for the IRS via last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, the agency continued historic trends of hassling primarily low-income taxpayers, with relatively few millionaires and billionaires getting caught up in the audit sweep.

“The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit,” reported TRAC, noting that the poorest taxpayers are “easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions.”

In fact, “if one ignores the fiction of auditing a millionaire through simply sending a letter through the mail, the odds that millionaires received a regular audit by a revenue agent (1.1%) was actually less than the audit rate of the targeted lowest income wage-earners whose audit rate was 1.27 percent!”

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, directed $80 billion worth of new funding over the next decade to the IRS so it could hire 87,000 new workers, purportedly to better target millionaire and billionaire scofflaws. The Biden administration and credulous journalists claimed that this would in no way increase audits for those making under $400,000 annually—suspect assurances not provided within the text of the actual bill. This increased capacity meant only those at the top would be targeted, supporters insisted. But this ignores how the IRS’s incentives work and how agencywide reform might be too heavy of a lift.

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The way you walk is apparently as unique as your fingerprint and the UAE wants to use it to track criminals

According to reports out of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), biometrics are gaining an ever more prominent place in local law enforcement’s activities, and the type of technology involved is also getting ever more fine-grained.

Accuracy aside – but apparently, the way you walk – as interpreted by mass surveillance technology – can now be used as an incriminating piece of evidence against you in this country.

As always with these stories, one wonders how in the world the police ever managed to do their job for centuries (as they have done) without relying on invasive and controversial technologies like this – but that is not the question most media outlets are willing to “bother” with just now.

Instead, we’re hearing from one of the Emirates, Dubai, that the thing with biometric surveillance of the population – handily justified as something positive, when there’s a criminal case that can be attached to the practice – has now gone well beyond fingerprinting, facial recognition, and such.

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